


You Know This to be True

by DearHeartx



Series: Fictober 2018 [24]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-23 22:00:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30062148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DearHeartx/pseuds/DearHeartx
Summary: He's gone.You know this.You know this to be true.But those memories just won't let you believe it.
Relationships: Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age)
Series: Fictober 2018 [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802731





	You Know This to be True

The rotunda was colder than usual. One of the staff had come in and lit a fire in the hearth despite Solas’ absence and its orange blaze cast long shadows across the empty stone floor. His desk seemed completely undisturbed; papers, books, and a few incandescent shards still littered the top. Oriana was certain she was the only one who knew what was missing.  
Solas had kept a small leather bound journal of all his journeys through the Fade. He’d read to her from it on multiple occasions, sometimes to show her the vast complexities and dark unknowns of the world they lived in and other times simply to help her fall asleep when the pain in her hand grew to be too much. That timeworn, faded leather book was gone. Solas was gone.  
Flashbulb memories ran through her head like a flickering home movie spliced together frame by frame. Single images, half a phrase spoke in his calm, dulcet tones.

_“My name is Solas.”_

_His nose wrinkles as he tries to choke down a steaming cup of tea._

_“Not like that,” followed by a melodic chuckle as he wraps his arm around her and shows her the correct flourish for using the stray magic of the Veil to increase her offensive spells. Even though it’s merely memory, she felt her face flame when she heard his rough breathing so close in her ear._

_His strong but delicate fingers encircling her wrists as he pulls her into him, surprising her with their first real kiss moments after she thought she’d ruined everything. The faint taste of lyrium and mint on his tongue._

_It’s nearly pitch black in the early hours of the morning before even the Skyhold staff has awoken and she finds him alone, studying an archaic book in a disused alcove of the fortress’s basement. His smile starts shy but shifts into something she can’t quite pin. It’s a smirk that has an almost animal-like quality to it. Before she can ask him what he’s researching, he has her pinned to the wall and his mouth is marking a trail from her chin to the tip of her ear. She shivers and knows it has nothing to do with the fact that this abandoned alcove hasn’t seen a fire in it’s hearth in decades, maybe longer. She crumbles beneath him._

The memories crumbled, too. They morphed into something else. Something she didn’t want to remember.

_“I can’t.”_   
_He’s disentangling himself from her grip, hot tears cutting down her bare face. They shouldn’t feel different than the tears she cried last week after receiving the news about her clan from Wycome, but they do._

_He’s bent over the broken foci, mouth pressed into a hard line._   
_“I’m sorry, I know finding it was important to you. Maybe we could still gather research.”_   
_His eyes flash angrily and he ignores her. The silence feels like a gut punch in the wake of their shattered relationship. She turns away from not realizing it’s the last time she’ll ever see him._

She opened her eyes and was greeted by the still empty rotunda. Something deep within her recesses—where she had pushed all her rage, fear, grief, and regret—snapped. She swept her arm across Solas’ desk in one quick motion, sending the contents resting atop it scattering into disarray. The books slammed onto the ground with echoing thuds and the loose leaf papers flew high into the air before drifting down to meet the books.  
Not yet satisfied, she grabbed the corner of the desk itself and hauls it onto its side. The wood doesn’t crack, splinter, or snap like she had hoped, but just the fact that it’s askew and would drive Solas crazy is enough.  
Panting heavily, her arms aching, but still not finished, she walked toward the colorful frescoes that covered most of the rotunda’s walls. She dragged her finger across the paint where the colors changed from red to orange to blue, each painstaking swath of color laid across wet plaster. She’d helped him mix the ash and lime.

_“Fenhedis!” She cursed as she rubbed the wet plaster off her arm, her skin already reddening from the caustic material. She wrapped it in a wet strip of cotton and tried to bite back the tears._   
_A soft thud landed behind her. Solas dusted off his hands as he rose from a crouch and the scaffolding behind him swayed from the force of his jump. He ignored the precarious contraption as he rushed toward her, his hands outstretched and his face contorted in a mixture of worry and fondness._   
_Before she’d even registered his movements, he’d taken her dagger from the desk behind her, conjured a lemon as if from nowhere, and sliced it in half. He discarded one half and slid the other across her arm, the cool, sticky juice soothing the burn from the plaster._   
_“How did you..?” She began._   
_He smiled crookedly. “This is far from my first mural. In fact, back home I used to grow lemons simply because I knew I would need them for this purpose. Now I need Josephine to import them from Nevara.” He sighed, his eyes growing cloudy and wistful as he continued to rub the fruit against her cooling skin._   
_Her fingers touched his smooth cheek. “Home?” She said._   
_He pushed the lemon into her hand and turned his back on her. “That’s a story for another time, I think.” He said as he sidled back up the scaffolding._

Her breathing was heavy and irregular as she remembered how “another time” never came. The man who claimed to love her more than life itself, the man who said she was his heart never bothered to tell her anything about him at all. All he did was tear down her defenses and leave. Her chest heaved and hot tears streamed down her face. She kicked the bowl of plaster, set and useless after being left undisturbed for days. The metal bowl rattled across the stone floor, sending shockwaves of noise throughout the rotunda, but it still wasn’t loud enough to drown out the memories.  
She grabbed a jar of paint and flung it at the wall. Its ear-splitting crack against the wall a satisfying balm to her soul. She grabbed the greens and umbers, the dark pigments swirling into a muddy mess destroying the beautiful pieces she and Solas had worked so hard to build. She grabbed the blues and indigos, the vibrant colors collided and dripped down the empty expanse of wall Solas had left unfinished—barren and cold, alone. The last jar, a deep red. She snatched it and whipped her arm back, ready to hurl it onto the spilled contents of his desk scattered across the floor.  
As her hand reared back, preparing for the throw, a single piece of paper caught her eye. Dark scratches of charcoal against bleached white velum. Somehow when he drew her, her just-a-little-too-big-ears seemed just right. Her knees gave out beneath her and she collapsed beside the drawing, the jar of paint in her hand broken and cascading across the streaks of charcoal, the last fragment of Solas she had left, nothing left but black and red swirls of pain.  
She looked around at the destroyed memories and whimpered.


End file.
